| Collection Description | Born in Paris, Françoise Henry studied at the École du Louvre under the great celticist, Henri Hubert. Her first
major publication Les Tumulus du Départment de la Côte-d’Or was a comprehensive study of Iron Age burials.
She studied Carolingian and medieval art with Emile Mâle and Henri Focillon and it was her interest in
medieval art that led her to Ireland and University College Dublin. During a visit to Ireland in the late 1920s
she saw the Ahenny Crosses in County Tipperary which perhaps more than anything else attracted her to the
study of Irish art. In 1928 she published her first article on Irish art, ‘La chapelle de Cormac à Cashel’.
Her career began in UCD as an exchange lecturer in the Department of French in 1934. By the 1940s she
was lecturing in Archaeology and European Art, working on a study of Irish antiquities and accumulating a
large collection of illustrations of Irish art, mainly in the form of photographic negatives and prints. Some years
later Dr Henri became Director of Studies in Archaeology and the History of European Painting. The nucleus
of what is now the History of Art Department in University College Dublin is to be found in the Purser-Griffith
lecture series on European painting which she began in 1934.
She carried out a considerable amount of excavation work at Glendalough, at Iniskea off the Mayo coast, and
elsewhere; but she is primarily renowned as a scholar of early Irish art. Her first important publication on the
subject was La sculpture irlandaise in 1934. In 1940 she published a major work entitled Irish Art, a study
combining manuscripts, sculpture and metalwork in brilliant synthesis. The culmination of her publishing
career was the three volume work in French and English which appeared between 1963 and 1970—L’Art
irlandais, Irish art in the early Christian period, during the Viking invasions, and in the Romanesque period.
Dr Henri retired from UCD in 1974, the year in which the Book of Kells appeared, reproductions from the
manuscript for which she wrote the text. Her final years were spent at her home at Lindry in France where she
died in 1982. [UCD Archives] |
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